12 Visitors vs 12 Million: What Most Startups Get Wrong with Justin Abrams & Mike Rispoli
A/B testing your landing page with 12 visitors. Building a custom e-commerce platform when you haven't made your first sale. Redesigning your app three times before launch because it doesn't look like Apple. If any of this sounds familiar, Justin Abrams and Mike Rispoli, co-founders of Cause of a Kind, have some hard truths for you.
Join hosts Nick Paladino and Chuck Moxley as we explore what happens when you have 12,000 visitors a month instead of 12 million. Justin and Mike introduce brilliant basics: stop trying to innovate and just play the greatest hits. Use Shopify templates, use Webflow, don't build custom solutions like you're a billion-dollar brand when you're not.
They don't talk about failure, they talk about data collection. These two have been friends since they were 15, tried building software for a decade, failed a lot, before finally building an agency because their network kept asking them to do what they're actually good at.
Justin's thesis: follow opportunity instead of your passions. Stop fighting the universe and listen to where opportunities come from. Mike's framework: marry the problem but date the solution. The founders who succeed stay flexible on how they solve it, not what they're solving. And they break down the maturation journey: certain businesses aren't mature enough for nuanced analytics. If you're just starting, measure session duration, page consumption, click paths and not tiny conversion funnel optimizations.
Key Actionable Takeaways:
- Play the greatest hits until you have meaningful traffic - Use Shopify templates for e-commerce or Webflow for B2B sites rather than custom builds; you can't AB test landing pages with no traffic, and trying to innovate before validation wastes time and money
- Features are friction for startups - Each additional feature confuses your marketing story, elevator pitch, and user flows; solve one problem extremely well before adding capabilities, and resist the urge to redesign before you have user data
- Manually shepherd early users and measure different metrics - With low traffic, watch screen recordings, talk to individual users, measure session duration and click paths rather than conversion funnels; find your first-dollar metric (like Facebook's seven connections) and optimize getting users there faster
Want more tips and strategies about creating frictionless digital experiences?
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Download the Five Step Site Speed Target Playbook: http://bluetriangle.com/playbook
Cause of a Kind: https://causeofakind.com
Strictly From Nowhere Podcast: https://www.causeofakind.com/strictly-from-nowhere
Justin Abrams' LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cuzzinjustin/
Mike Rispoli's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-rispoli-cto/
Nick Paladino's LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/npaladino
Chuck Moxley's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckmoxley/